The end-of-the-year extravaganza has passed, and now you’ve come into 2013 with a clean slate and an empty backlog, right? (It’s okay, I know your pain).  As the industry readies itself for another console generation, we the consumers are left wondering: what’s next? What more could they possibly do to change how we perceive games? Technology will always improve, but it’s how we interact with the medium that leaves the lasting impression.

Over the last year we’ve seen a number of things that make for a promising future; many of those things are the games themselves, the entire reason we exist as contributors to this industry. Some hope to remove the boundary between gaming as an interactive versus a passive experience, while others aim to build upon a foundation in order to evolve with the standards.  The gaming industry is in dire need of a renaissance, and if we’re lucky, some of these games will be the start of it.

Cyberpunk 2077

CD Projekt RED is perhaps best known for bringing to life one of Poland’s most popular fantasy novels, The Witcher, but what many people don’t know is that they also run GOG.com, a digital catalogue of thousands of classic games no longer available in physical format. When word spread that RED was intent on turning the classic pen-and-paper RPG Cyberpunk into a video game, it just made sense. But not only did it seem right up their alley, it was something sorely lacking in the market. The cyberpunk setting is a road so rarely traveled in the gaming industry that often it feels watered down and underrepresented when we finally do see it on the screen. It’s most known for games like Deus Ex and System Shock, and of course popularized by movie classics such as Blade Runner and Brazil, but it’s about time we started to see the cyberpunk setting really make a name for itself in the gaming world and step out of the shadow of its younger, more popular, albeit less attractive brother, steampunk. And CD Project RED is the perfect studio to bring about that revolution.

Watch Dogs

When Ubisoft first unveiled their radical new IP at 2012’s E3, most people didn’t know what to expect. The vast majority was impressed, but left wanting more. Since then the Montreal-based team at Ubisoft working on the project has remained relatively tight-lipped about the project. The premise centers around the player’s ability to hack into any electronic device in the immediate area: street lights, cell phones, cameras – anything. Not only did the game look stunning, but it showed off tremendous animations and lighting that emasculates anything of recent years. This gadgets-and-gizmos open world game looks to shake the genre up and provide a sandbox experience like few others, and in our modern world consumed with the lust for technology, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Star Citizen

Star what? If you’re not familiar with this game, educate yourself quickly. Star Citizen is an upcoming space simulation game developed by Chris Roberts, the man behind the Wing Commander series. It is also, to date, the highest funded crowd-sourced project ever. As of November 17, 2012, it has earned over $4.2 million dollars from both Kickstarter and donations via the game’s main website, the latter of which is still ongoing. Star Citizen promises to bring immersion to the front of the table. Taking cues from Demon’s Souls and a little virtual sim known as real life, atmosphere will be Roberts’s top concern, wanting to make a game that not only looks and plays right, but feels right; one that isn’t bogged down by logistics and spreadsheets. If it goes off without a hitch, Star Citizen could quite possibly become one of the most important games ever made.

Dark Souls 2

I admit this is a bit of a personal admission on my part. I hold the Souls series to such high standards; it almost feels unfair of me to include it, near nepotistic. But one cannot deny the impact that this franchise has had on the industry. Demon’s Souls answered one of the most seminal questions that many had pondered over for decades: can a game with absolutely zero mass marketing, with an unquestionable sense of danger and urgency, be a commercial success? The answer was a resounding yes. Dark Souls took the series to another level by introducing a meticulously crafted, interconnected world full of shortcuts, pitfalls, and hidden rooms. Dark Souls 2, helmed by new directors Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, promises to retain the sense of accomplishment in a world fraught with peril that made the first two so genuinely satisfying, as well as the second game’s heightened exploration, all while refining and polishing up some of the admittedly rougher edges (like the game’s ingenious yet fickle multiplayer system, and the obtuse Covenants introduced in Dark Souls).

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been on the cutting edge of technological advancement. Ground Zeroes hopes to take that precedent even further. The first-unveiled trailer for the game, coming in at near 11-minutes long, boasted some of the most impressive visuals seen in a game to date. Not only that, but the game’s cutscene transitioned seamlessly into gameplay without a pixel of lost resolution or texture quality. This kind of precision engineering is courtesy of the Fox engine, built from the ground up specifically for this game. If Kojima and his team can perfect that marriage of visual spectacle and interactive entertainment, then the future of the industry has just had its bar set pretty high.

In the next article, I’ll examine five more games that have the potential to make a serious dent in the state of modern gaming, but have equal the chance of becoming outright failures.